1999 ADeepnessintheSky

Subject Headings: Science Fiction Novel, Hard Science Fiction.

Notes

I'd stumbled into this title a few times in transhumanist literature and it had been decades since I last read Sci Fi.
The narrative is very well written (award winning), but the human nature presented is narrow (moral disgust, human love).
The war between the 'spiders' and 'cobbers' reconnected me with the ridiculousness of war, and the value of negotiation and peace keeping.
There are few reference to money (p.171). How will artificial consciousnesses trade?
There is little repulsion to enslavement (of forced 'Focus'ing). p193
There are many references to fallen empires (e.g. Alexander the Great) and a return to Medieval times.

(Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky Retrieved:2015-8-16.
- A Deepness in the Sky is a Hugo Award–winning science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. Published in 1999, the novel is a loose prequel (set twenty thousand years earlier) to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992). The title is coined by one of the story's main characters in a debate, in a reference to the hibernating habits of his species and to the vastness of space.

… The fellow was a good listener, and his questions gave Unnerby ideas he might never have had otherwise. Some of those might actually make money. Lots of money. Hmm.
p171
… Qiwi reached out a still-shaking hand to touch his shoulder. He shrugged the way you might shoo off a pesky bug. In some ways Papa still lived, but in others he seemed more dead than Mama. Tomas said that Focus could be reversed. But Tomas needed Papa and the other Focused the way they were now. Besides, Tomas had been raised an Emergent. They used Focus to make people into property. They were proud of doing so. Qiwi knew that there were plenty of Qeng Ho survivors who considered all the talk of "reversal of Focus" to be a lie. So far, not a single Focused person had been reversed. p193

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
1999 ADeepnessintheSky	Vernor Vinge (1944-2024)			A Deepness in the Sky						1999